It's the wrong environment for Trenton's housing scheme

It's been said that if you sat an infinite number of monkeys down at an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually type out the entire works of Shakespeare.

Perhaps. But I bet they'd never type out the phrase "affordable-housing fee." The only primate that could come up with something like that is a Trenton bureaucrat.

They don't keep those animals in a zoo. But they should. Just ask Joseph the carpenter.

Joseph is not his real name. He wants to keep that a secret from the bureaucracy. But Joe's a real guy, exactly the type of guy whom New Jersey's affordable-housing laws are supposed to help. He's a retired blue-collar worker who wanted to replace a substandard house, an exact match for the theoretical goals of the state affordable- housing bureaucracy.

Joe moved to a house at the Shore after retiring from a carpentry job up north. He had a bad house, but it was in a good location. With his knowledge of the building trades, Joe figured replacing the shack with a modern house would be relatively simple. It was then that he encountered the above oxymoron.

"As we were getting ready to knock the old house down and build a new one, the town told us we would have to pay an affordable-housing fee," Joe told me.

I went ape when I heard that phrase. A "fee" by definition adds to the price of whatever is being sold. An "affordable-housing fee" therefore is a contradiction in terms. It makes housing less affordable, not more affordable. A whole lot less affordable, as Joe found out.

The state regulations demanded Joe pay 1 percent of the value of new house, or about $4,000. That money would go to build housing for some other person somewhere else in town. But Joe was having enough trouble paying for his own house. Why should he get stuck with the bill for someone else's house as well?

Don't worry. The Corzine administration is going to do something about that fee.

It's going to increase it.

Under the affordable-housing rules released by the Department of Community Affairs the other day, the affordable housing fee would rise to 1.5 percent. That's in addition to a whole lot of other fees and regulations that raise the cost of housing for thousands of working-class people like Joe and his wife.

The money goes into the Trenton bureaucracy, specifically to the Council on Affordable Housing. COAH, as it's known, was created by the Legislature in response to the state Supreme Court's decisions in the two Mount Laurel cases. The theory behind those decisions, as I have heard it described by starry-eyed legislators, is that anyone should be able to buy a new house in any town in New Jersey regardless of income.

This is nutty, on pure economic grounds. And it's nuttiness squared when you consider that the same people who espouse this theory also espouse a great love for the environment. And it's nuttiness cubed when you consider that these same people have all enlisted in the war on global warming.

I have that on the best authority. Paul Ehrlich says so.

Ehrlich is the Stanford University biology professor who rose to prominence in 1968 with his book "The Population Bomb." He was recently in the news as the editor of a study that showed why divorce is bad for the environment. Divorced couples split into two households and thereby use up about twice as much energy, the study concluded.

The logic of that study can of course be applied to the administration's plan to build 115,000 affordable-housing units largely in the suburbs. More houses mean more energy use.

"It's more than a little nutty," said Ehrlich when I described the plan to him. "When you build out there in the suburbs, it's not just a matter of paving over more of the natural ecology that supports our lives but also pouring large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere."

Though he's lived in California for the past half-century, Ehrlich is intimately familiar with New Jersey. He's a graduate of Columbia High School in Maplewood. From an environmentalist's perspective, he said, the solution to the affordable-housing problem is simple: Build in the old cities like Newark and Jersey City.

"We should be rescuing our cities and building around mass transit," said Ehrlich. "It takes a lot more energy to support 100 people in individual mansions than in a high-rise. And they're also going to commute by car, which is more carbon-intensive."

I'm a bit of a skeptic on the global warming thing, but the Trenton crowd embraces it. And it also embraces a housing plan that would put tons more carbon dioxide into the air.

So that's COAH in a nutshell: a bureaucracy that makes housing less affordable while causing harm to the environment. That makes about as much sense to a regular human being as "King Lear" makes to a monkey.